Art

Pop goes the Dali

By MARY ANN MARGER, Times Art Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 5, 2000

Although his connection to surrealism is vague, it gives us a chance to see James Rosenquist's work in his best medium - painting.

ST. PETERSBURG -- It's a frail connection that the Salvador Dali Museum has made in inviting James Rosenquist to exhibit paintings. Rosenquist is a pop artist, not a surrealist. He met Dali on two or three occasions in New York. The show barely fits the museum's commitment to bring in art relevant to Dali or surrealism.

But what of it? Dali curator William Jeffett has given us a splendid opportunity to understand the bay area's celebrity artist through his painting, his best medium.

On view are just 19 of these Gargantuas, but what powerful works they are, in brilliant hues, floor to ceiling. An inner museum wall had to be removed to display The Holy Roman Empire through Checkpoint Charlie, which is 391/2 feet long.

Rosenquist, 66, moved to Aripeka in Hernando County in 1976 after becoming an internationally recognized pop artist in New York. Though he maintains homes in New York City and in Westchester, he lives here most of the year.

The show covers work as early as 1961, with more than half from the last decade. The artist's evolution is by theme and content, not style, and the works are not in chronological order. Identical wall text is placed at both beginning and end of the show, in a clever touch so viewers can see it first or wait till after they've seen Dali's work on permanent display.

Also displayed are Rosenquist's favorite works by Dali, drab and puny in comparison to his own work. Most pop art requires size and vibrancy to make its point. The museum is also offering Rosenquist's graphics, many produced by Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida and displayed in the area before.

But the paintings, not the other works, justly demand our attention on this occasion.

Rosenquist recycles advertising images into fine art symbols. Instead of clear-cut messages, he gives us the opposite: a confusion of well-executed images with no clear meaning.

Why so complicated? "I was sick and tired of advertising," he says.

He may despise it now, but he owes his start to it. Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, N.D., he began his career painting Pegasus, the flying red horse logo for Mobil. After winning a scholarship to the Art Students League, he left for New York. There he met many other artists who were just becoming known.

He was averaging $120 a week painting billboards, a sum he could easily live on in New York in the 1960s. He did his first paintings after hours, using leftover supplies from commercial jobs.

Rosenquist developed his particular style of pop art after noting the impact of images in movies, television, advertising and comics. Several other artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, all had noted the phenomenon independently and worked out their own responses in different ways. Theirs was not an attempt to create a fine art for the masses but to objectify what was happening through visual commentary.

For Warhol and Lichtenstein, images on canvas remained an easy read. For Rosenquist, they became fragmented and juxtaposed. The substance of the work does not reveal itself all at once but unfolds gradually with successive viewings, sometimes over years. Don't expect a billboard to do that.

In this way his work does have a vague connection to surrealism, especially Dali's variety, which has been defined as the placement of real subjects in unreal situations. Both artists express a high degree of technical proficiency.

But while surrealism grew from Freudian theories of dreams, pop art draws from everyday life.

Name an issue of our times and you are likely to find it incorporated in the paintings of James Rosenquist. Violence. AIDS. The environment. The fragility of life on earth.

Imagine an Apple Eaten overlaps three round images: the bare outline of an apple, a circle for a colorblind test, and the familiar photo of the world seen from outer space. On the left are paper airplanes; on the right, strips containing fragments of information identifying them as the eyes of a beautiful woman. Is this Eve? Is this evil? Is this the future and the past?

Time Dust -- Black Hole repeats the colorblind circle but in shades of gray. We see more circles: a French horn, a relief map, the end of a pop-top can, pencil erasers. The center of the work is black nothingness. Like many of Rosenquist's long works, there is no one focal point.

Tied in the Horizon revives Pegasus, juxtaposing it with a rocking chair, barely seen in black on black, balancing a light socket with no bulb, framing a newspaper headline about Squeaky Fromme's attempt on President Ford's life. It was painted while the event and its fallout were fresh in the artist's mind. The center is a small but real hole through the canvas.

The hole is in a flower-like form, another circle. The circle, the most basic of symbols, has no beginning or end. It can be a drop of water beneath a microscope, the shape of a French horn, the business end of a handgun, a pizza, the zeros of a hundred dollar bill. The hole left by a bullet. The Black Hole. The shape of the earth.

More playful are other works in the show. What are the chances of a meteor coming through the roof and hitting you? Rosenquist has incorporated the idea into a series of works, two of which are on display. For The Meteor Hits Picasso's Bed, he affixed charred wood or charcoal to form a bed frame and painted across it a Picasso-esque nude. On one bedpost he adds a tiny African figure carving (Picasso was heavily influenced by African art) and on another, a paintbrush. Random and remote, a meteor suggests aspects beyond control.

Gift Wrapped Doll #8, from a 1992 series of dolls wrapped in cellophane, appears painted as the artist observed it, without reinterpretation of how it "should" look. The shiny streaks thus take on a life of their own, so it exists not only as a painting "of" something but as a separate and unique object. The work belongs to Rosenquist's 10-year-old daughter, Lily. Other dads give their daughters Barbie dolls. Lucky Lily.

Probably the most fascinating work for the casual viewer is Pink Condition, an eye-level view of the barrel of a gun that seems to follow the viewer around. Like Nails, 15 nails marked off as days counted by a prisoner, it is immediately understood.

The most recent work in the show, Mariner -- Speed of Light, refers to what a person might see traveling at such high speed. It is a composition of convoluted swirls, hard to view because the eye can't reconcile the content, either mentally or visually.

The speed of light is fast, but the illumination of ideas is slow. How long does it take to relate Pegasus to the toll of petroleum on our natural resources?

These works are not lectures but observations and revelations experienced by the artist. Yet for all that, what Rosenquist reveals most in this work is himself. He cannot help it; in work this sincere, the artist will out.

It is no surprise to learn that he has been active in local conservation efforts and in the National Endowment for the Arts.

Or that, in a letter published in the Times last year, urging support from Hernando County residents for an arts center, he wrote, "We should begin now to impart humanism into our young ones and to educate them to the arts and humanities. ... Appreciation for arts and letters is the opposite of war and conflict."

James Rosenquist: Paintings

• Where: Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S., St. Petersburg.
• When: 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday; noon to 5:30 p.m. Sunday; 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; through Sept. 10.
• Cost: Adults, $9; students, $4; discounts for seniors, students, groups and children, and after 5 p.m. Thursday.
• Catalog; $34.95 in gift shop.
• More Information: (727) 823-3767 (St. Petersburg).

Also on display:

• "James Rosenquist Selects Dali," Rosenquist's favorite works from the museum's permanent collection, through Sept. 10.
• "James Rosenquist: Graphic Works," graphics from the artist's collection.
• "Selections from the Permanent Collection."

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